Call for Participation

Important Dates

May 5 , 2018: submissions due
May 8, 2018: participants notified
June 10, 2018: Workshop held in Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Design

Submissions may be sent via email to workshop organizers at: wodom[AT]sfu.ca

Overview

Temporality—the state of existing within time—shapes virtually all aspects of how we experience and construct the world around us. Time touches on many core aspects of research and practice in the design and HCI communities. Interaction and graphical user interfaces are fundamentally temporal; time is the medium through which an interactive dialogue between a human and computer begins, unfolds, and resolves. As focus in HCI expanded outside of the workplace and into the many contexts of everyday life, the need to develop a multiplicity and diversity of ways to engage with and inquire into time, temporality, and slowness have steadily emerged. We invite researchers and practitioners in HCI and design investigating time, temporality, and/or slowness in their work to participate in a hands-on workshop at DIS 2018.

The core goals of this one-day workshop are to:

Bring together researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based insights and issues that have emerged through our respective works;
Develop an agenda for future HCI work on temporality, time, and slowness that reflects the diversity and needs of research and practitioners working in this space.
A broader goal beyond this workshop is to strengthen and sustain an international network of HCI researchers and practitioners investigating topics of time, temporality, and slowness. Possible workshop themes for submissions include, but are certainly not limited to:

Process and insights into practice– What kinds of concepts, methods, and/or approaches have productively supported designers and researchers in making new artifacts, technologies, or systems that deviate from enacting normative conceptions of time? How is the ‘long-term’ conceptualized and attended to in the design process? What are the practical, ethical, and/or moral issues of creating systems intended to outlive (and be maintained) beyond the lives of those that design them?

Social or cultural constructions of time – What are appropriate and viable ways of studying how time is socially or culturally constructed? How can such insights be incorporated into the design of new technologies? What tensions are potentially entangled with pursing these research initiatives?

Expressions, representations, and materiality of time – How are alternative representations of time and temporal expressions manifested through the design of new artifact, technologies, or systems? What are the relations (and possible tensions) among time, speed, and pacing in these examples? How do the material aspects of a design artifact shape the experience of interacting and living with it over time?

Methodological matters – What kinds of methods, tactics, and approaches are needed to study and/or design technologies that embody alternative temporal forms? Where have methodological or practical struggles emerged and how have they been addressed? What is the biggest challenge to researching and designing for time and temporality?

Interested participants are invited to submit a temporal artifact to this workshop. We use the term temporal artifact to cover a wide range of topic and outcomes of research related to time, temporality, and slowness (e.g., (auto)ethnographic account, design artifact or system, digital artwork, critical essay, speculative design workbook, etc.). This should include a position paper in CHI extended abstract format (maximum 4 pages) describing the temporal artifact, and digital documentation of the artifact itself (e.g., image, video, website, software application). This written portion consists of a short, 1-4 page submission formatted using the ACM SIGCHI extended abstracts format template that responds to our overarching goal to develop concise, concrete examples of outcomes and struggles of conducting temporal HCI research.

In addition, participants are asked to submit a brief (200 word) personal biography. Submissions will be accepted based on quality and interest and will represent a spectrum of practices, materials, backgrounds, and concerns.

Submissions may be sent via email to workshop organizers at: wodom[AT]sfu.ca

At least one author of each accepted position paper must register and attend the workshop. All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the ACM DIS conference. Workshop outcomes will be communicated via our website, which will be maintained beyond the workshop itself, as well as through an edited special issue of a journal (e.g., TOCHI, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing) mapping contemporary issues and opportunities for HCI research engaging with time, temporality, and slowness.

Schedule

Workshop structure

The proposed one-day workshop will be held on site at the DIS 2018 conference venue.

Time	Activity
9-9:30am	Welcome and introductions by organizers; overview of workshop
9:30-11am	90-minute studio-style critique and exchange of participants’ temporal artifacts (1^st 1/3 of participants)*
11-11:30am	Group discussion
11:30am-1pm	Lunch
1-2:30pm	90-minute studio-style critique and exchange of participants’ temporal artifacts (2^nd 1/3 of participants)*
2:30-3pm	Group discussion
3-3:30pm	Break
3:30-4:30pm	90-minute studio-style critique and exchange of participants’ temporal artifacts (3^rd 1/3 of participants)*
4:30-5:30pm	Open reflection / discussion moderated by organizers aimed at critically mapping issues, complications and opportunities for future HCI research on time, temporality, and slowness

*We will thematically group critique/discussions based on how contributions fit with workshop themes. After reviewing all submissions we will exact thematic areas that will form the basis for these sessions. For example, the first session may focus on (auto)ethnographic of temporality (and technology), whereas the second session may focus on tensions and issues in designing for the long-term, across multiple generations. There will be overlap in these areas; the thematic groupings will help focus group discussion following each session.

Organizers

William Odom is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. A key part of his research program focuses on conceptually developing slowness as a framing for design through design practice. He was lead organizer of the DIS 2012 workshop on Slow Technology: Critical Reflection and Future Directions.

Siân Lindley is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Her research involves studies of technologies in use and the human practices that are built up around them. Time and temporality are a recurring theme in her work; she has published on the topic in CHI and CSCW, and was the lead organizer of a CHI 2013 workshop on changing perspectives of time in the HCI and design communities.

Larissa Pschetz is an assistant professor (UK lecturer) at the University of Edinburgh. She completed a Microsoft-funded PhD in Design, with a thesis entitled Temporal Design: Design for a Multi-Temporal World (2014). She has contributed to publications, workshops and events on time, particularly drawing attention to the need to look at temporal notions as emerging out of relations between cultural, social, economic and political forces.

Vasiliki Tsaknaki is currently a researcher and teacher assistant at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, located in Stockholm, Sweden. She has just received her PhD degree from KTH, in the domain of interaction design. Her research is on the intersection of interaction design, material experiences, and studio crafts—including hybrid crafts. She also works with critical views on the making of interactive artefacts. Her approach to materiality extends to studying both theoretically and practically the qualities of preciousness and impermanence for designing computational artefacts.

Anna Vallgårda is an Associate Professor and Head of the IxD lab at the IT University of Copenhagen. My research is focused on developing Interaction Design as a material practice. Her research investigates the computer as a material for design and experiment with it as such with the aim of creating new material expressions for computational things. She has previously organized numerous workshops at the CHI conference.

Mikael Wiberg is a professor in Informatics at Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests ranges from concept-driven interaction design to questions concerning interaction design at architectural scale. He is author of the forthcoming book “The Materiality of Interaction: Notes on the materials of interaction design” MIT Press.

Daisy Yoo is a PhD Candidate Daisy Yoo is a PhD candidate in the Information School and a member of the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab at the University of Washington. She is interested in the use of digital technologies in politically contested arenas and long(er)-term design thinking. Her current research focuses on addressing challenges of designing with emerging, pluralistic publics in the case of end-of-life law, policy, and practice in the United States.

Submissions + Outcomes

After the workshop, we will encourage participants to continue to share their experiences regarding the implementation of insights and concepts developed in the workshop, with an eye toward how a strong and diverse community of researchers at DIS investigating time, temporality, and slowness could be nurtured.

On this website, we will document and archive each of the temporal artifacts presented as well as the ensuing discussion. The website will also provide a format for disseminating higher-level insights and concepts emerging from the workshop in the service of having a persistent web space for continuing discussion around how to nurture and expand focus on time, temporality, and slowness at DIS.

As a broader form of dissemination, we will write an article to be submitted to ACM Interactions, which will summarize the discussion and outcomes of the workshop. This will aim to play a key role in attracting wider attention among both design-oriented HCI researchers and, importantly, HCI practitioners. We will also aim to coalesce findings from the workshop in research publications such as a special issue of a journal (e.g., TOCHI, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing) mapping contemporary issues and opportunities for HCI research engaging with time, temporality, and slowness. While dependent on the outcomes of the workshop, we speculate this will emphasize future opportunities, issues and challenges in the service of productively guiding future work.